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1The aim of this article is—to put it at its most general—to provide a description of the communicative situation in which texts of narrative art participate, with a focus on their status as a message sent from a sender to a receiver. Certain conditioning factors will be considered here, factors relating to the possibility and effectiveness of the transmission of a narrative communication. It can be said that the analyses carried out here belong to the field of sociology of literature in a two-fold sense: (1) they can be applied to actual sender-receiver situations, connected with concrete, historical creators of narrative utterances, with their works, and with the consumers of those works, that is, with the literary public; (2) they can be related to (and this relation is our principal concern here) dispositions of sender and receiver that are inscribed in narrative works, with defined roles of senders and receivers, and to the—let us say—“spectacle of literary communication” that the narrative text supplies. Contrary to certain traditions connected with the study of narrative texts, we will speak here of the configuration sender-communication-receiver as an integral whole, without the privileging usually given in research to the situation of sending, whereby it is treated almost in isolation from the entirety of the configuration of the narrative.1

2 At the start of our discussion, it is appropriate to make two substantive assumptions. The first relates to personal sender-receiver relations within the narrative text. This issue has been discussed many times over the past few years, and studies by Polish scholars had no small part in the discussion. Following on from these deliberations (and especially following Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska’s attempt to offer a synthesis of this issue2), we will speak of at least three levels of sender-receiver relations within the narrative text: (1) the relation on the axis: the speaking figure belonging to the presented world—that figure’s utterance—the receiving figure; (2) the relation on the axis: the (principal) narrator of the text—his/her utterance (in which is contained, inter alia, the entire configuration mentioned in (1))—the addressee of the narrative; (3) the relation on the axis: the subject figure of the entirety of the text—the entire text (in which is contained, above all, the whole configuration mentioned in (2))—the addressee of the text. Besides this—beyond the structure of the text itself—we will speak of the relation among a more-or-less concretely under|stood sender or author of the text, the text itself as his/her product, and a more-or-less concrete receiver or reader. It is necessary to point out that in assuming these basic differentiations of levels of sender-receiver relations in a text, we are leaving to one side the question as to how the component persons of these relations are indicated and called into semantic existence: the narrator, the addressee of the narrative etc. Thus, it is not a matter here of the degree of directness/immediacy in relation to the indirectness of their disclosure.

3 The second assumption derives from the general theses of information theory. It insists on the fact that every message and piece of information is considered not as individual wholes, but in opposition to a certain universe of possibilities, of a certain “variety”. These universes of informational possibilities, within which the differentiation of defined pieces of information is made, we will call stereotypes. We will, however, distinguish between the stereotype of sending—the collection of possibilities at the disposal of the sender—and the stereotype of reception—the collection of possibilities expected by the receiver.3

4 The remarks that follow move toward making analyses of the stereo|types that condition the transmission of a narrative text or its elements. Here it is a matter of the “presented transmission” and the “spectacle of communication” inscribed in the text. However, at a further stage, it is a matter of the real literary communicative situation.

5Looking at literary communication as something based on socially founded stereotypes is connected with a general sociological conviction concerning the role of stereotypes in all forms of social communication. In sociological thinking connected with the tradition of Durkheim, the concept of collective consciousness or collective memory is central—that is, central in the sense of a concept that is primary in relation to a “stereotype”. Such collective consciousness and memory are treated as a “frame” for individual consciousness or memory (see also Halbwachs 1925). The recognition, identification, and apportioning meaning to, for example, an element of an individual past is possible—according to the Durkheim school—only within the framework or against the background of the specific structure that is constituted by collective memory. It is only a grounding within collective memory that imposes a chronological and meaning endowed structuralisation on the chaotic, unchronological stream of individual memories and perceptions.

6 The stereotypes, the existence of which is decisive for the phenomenon of literary communication, also belong to the sphere of consciousness or collective memory, and all recognition and identification of literary information is only possible if one assumes the use on both sides of the communicative situation of close (or possible agreed on) stereotypes, and it takes place on the basis of those stereotypes. Against a background of the diverse stereotypes of social communication, stereotypes of literary communication are differentiated, inter alia, by a feature that one may describe as a low level of stability. For literary utterances are not only, as it were, inscribed in established stereotypes, ensuring them a stabilised reception at a certain stage of their historical reception (provided that appropriate reception stereotypes exist), and not only confirm and develop new stereotypes, but also (especially when it is a matter of works to which literary value is ascribed) go beyond in their elements the repertoires of possibilities that make up specific stereotypical schemas. They create impulses to form modified or new stereotypes. Such a state of affairs leads to a destabilising of reception: in the course of the reception of a literary work, prepared reception stereotypes that are not in tune with sending stereotypes must be modified. Before reception can be stabilised, the multi-phased social phenomenon of “attuning” sending and reception stereotypes takes place, after which once more (at another stage of reception) phenomena of a new destabilization can occur.

7We are using here the somewhat vague and too capacious term “stereo|type”, and we are avoiding, in general application, the term “convention”, even though any body of stereotypes has, in principle, a conventional character. Nevertheless, by accepted practice, it is easier and more appropriate to discuss literary convention in a narrower sense.4 If we understand stereotypes as universes or repertoires of informational possi|bilities, on the basis of which individual elements of literary communi|cations are recognizable, it is necessary to distinguish among them at least two basic groups. Let us attempt to characterise them.

8 1. Communiqués (and not just literary ones) dispatched by a sender to a receiver cannot be regarded as the only propositions covered by the process of communicating. They are, it is true, the only propositions that are directly communicated; however, they are accompanied by configurations of propositions that are implied by them—relatively—in reference to the sender, to the receiver, and to persons that constitute with them groups that are in a certain fashion homogeneous. One can say that communiqué K implies in relation to person N the propositions that constitute the potential social context of communiqué K with respect to person N. One is not speaking of implication in a strict logical sense or, indeed, in a sense of the propositions that result from communiqué K and that constitute its “deep structure”.5 Here it has to do with the fact that communiqué K refers to certain propositions, linked to it in diverse logical respects and entering into the repertoire of propositions that are at person N’s disposal. The social context (of a given communiqué in respect of a given person) is a repertoire of propositions that is, in principle, open and unlimited. If it is a matter of propositions belonging to a narrative text, it results from this that the subject uttering this text is presented, in general, as a figure that constructs a specific presented world by means not only of uttering a series of propositions, but also by means of implying an unlimited number of “omitted” utterances, such as he/she could have at his/her disposal in connection with this world. These, indeed, create a potential context for that which is uttered. This also occurs in those narrative forms in which the narrator is inhibited by a specific—for example, personal or behavioral—point of view. In these cases, whole fields of the possible social context of the narrative utterance are, indeed, subject to reduction. Nonetheless that which is not subject to reduction, remains an open configuration of potential utterances.

9 In what follows, there will be a discussion of the social context above all as potential utterances, linked with the intra-textual and presented sender and receiver. However, one must not forget about the multi-level nature of the literary utterance, and thus about the diversity of possible sender-receiver pairings. On the other hand, however, to treat the relations among social contexts that belong to the literary communiqué in relation to sender and receiver, as factors that condition literary communication, is to model real situations, in which communication depends to a large degree on the possession or lack of possession by sender and receiver of common contexts of utterance. Thus, it is obviously possible to view social contexts as belonging to the literary utterance in respect of a real author and a concrete assemblage of readers. Indeed, in both cases, the relation that emerges between the literary communiqué and its social context in relation to the sender, and that same context in relation to the receiver, but also between both those contexts, is fundamental for literary communi|cation. To the question as to what the connection is between the concept of stereotypes that condition literary transmission and the concept of social context, it would certainly be appropriate to give a facultative answer: it is possible to accept that the conventionalised repertoire of relations that can appear between communiqué K and its social contexts in respect of sender and receiver is a stereotype, and that as such it constitutes a conditioning factor of literary communication. However, it is also possible to say that the individual conventionalised relations that emerge between communiqué K and its social contexts (for example, the relation of the identity of these contexts) are those stereotypes.

102. We are speaking of the conventionalised relations between different social contexts of the literary utterance. However, the correct application of the term “convention” to the field of stereotypes of literary communication is different. Literary utterances imply not only social contexts, but also certain universes or repertoires of literary possibilities, which we will call here literary conventions. Within and, indeed, against the background of these universes the recognition or identification of the elements of the literary utterances. The sending convention and the receiving convention may, of course, be convergent, but they may also differ from each other. When constructing his/her message, the sender “counts on” the existence of a convention of reception that is expecting his/her utterance; the receiver “counting on” a convention of sending “meets it [that convention] halfway” with its own equivalent of a literary utterance, such as is constituted by his/her expectations, anticipations, and extrapolations. These “meetings halfway” lead to a phenomenon that one can define as strategies of sending and receiving.

11 The distinction of two aspects of literary communication—that based on the relations between social contexts of an utterance and that dependent on a greater or lesser degree of equivalence of conventions of sending and receiving—is, fundamentally, to demarcate syntagmatic and paradigmatic references of the text. Thus—to sum up—it is possible to distinguish looking at literary communication from a syntagmatic-contextual aspect and from the aspect of the text’s references to the paradigmatic-conventional configuration.

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12After making this fundamental distinction, let us look more closely at the matter of the relations between the literary utterance and its social contexts in respect of sender and receiver. An analysis of these relations will permit us to penetrate more thoroughly the course of the “spectacle of communication” that is inscribed in a narrative text, including where no shared or homogenous social contexts facilitate the communication of sender with receiver. A description of the relations of a literary utterance and its social contexts in respect of sender and receiver is doubtless connected with the by now traditional description of point of view resp. the scope of knowledge of the narrator and addressee of the narrative, or of the sender and receiver of the text as an entirety. This description, however, goes beyond what can be said about the point of view, because, in fact, it applies also to potential propositions, not contained in the literary utterance, but existing only in the sphere of information implied by that utterance in respect of sender or receiver. Further, it is here a matter, in fact, of the relations of collections of this implied information, that is of social contexts of sending and receiving, which is not usually an object of descriptions of the extent of knowledge or the point of view of narrator and addressee.

13 An analysis of the relations of social contexts particular to sender and receiver may offer a basis for building certain categories of description of narrative works, categories that can also be employed by historical poetics. An analysis of these relations should be—in accordance with the premise of the multi-levelled nature of the narrative utterance—conducted on different levels of the relationships of senders and receivers. Accordingly, the following will be weighed up:

1. the relations of a narrative message and the social contexts of sender and receiver on the level of narrator—addressee of the narrative:
2. the same relations within cross-level configuration, which embraces the level of the utterances of presented figures, and the level of the narrator and addressee of the text;
3. the same relations in the cross-level configuration, which embraces the level of the narrator and the addressee of the narrative, and the level of the subject of the entirety of the text and of the addressee of the text.

141a. As a point of departure, one can take the discussion of narrative texts for which the assumption has been made that to the narrator and addressee of the narrative there “is known” a specific common, homo|geneous presented world.6 This means that on the subject of this world they are capable of uttering what is in principle an unlimited number of appropriately mutually consistent empirical propositions. In this situation, one can say that a narrative utterance is possible that implies the same social context, both with regard to the sender as to the receiver. If we may make such an assumption, the sender’s strategy lies in restricting him/herself only to the minimal utterance K, so long as, with regard to the receiver, it implies a social context that is analogical to that of the sender. This entails that the receiver performs an act of supplementarily constructing the required social context. It is a “strategy of ellipsis”, of omitting the social context. It is applied, for example, where it is, in fact, a matter of setting forth elements that do not belong to that context that is common to sender and receiver. Such elements are, for example, certain configurations of events, but which in a novel possess substantial fabular tensions.

15 However, on the other hand, a strategy of ellipsis appears clearly in those narrative forms in which the rootedness of the narrator (and the receiver) in the created world (which is treated as natural and obvious) is strongly underlined, as well as their imbrication with that world. A minimalism of utterance, the seeming fortuitousness of that utterance, and a clear reliance on the skill of the receiver in supplementarily constructing a social context, these are characteristic of those forms that include, for example, the tale of the gawęda type.

16 If we assume the existence of the utterance that in relation to sender and receiver implies a similar social context, we can also, however, see as possible narrative conduct that is the opposite of the strategy of ellipsis, a strategy that we can call a “strategy of excess”. This is a matter of constructing an utterance K1—more developed than utterance K, the latter being an essential minimum for creating a social context with regard to sender and receiver. This strategy is usually deployed in those forms of the novel that—far from the silences and minimalisation of the utterance—speak of what is obvious both for the presented sender and for the receiver who is inscribed in the text.

171b. Let us further assume that a sender “knows” a certain presented world (that is, he/she is capable of constructing on the subject of that world an—in principle—unlimited number of propositions), but the presented receiver is somehow deprived of this knowledge. In this case (when the sender is, for example, a participant in events within a certain presented world, and the receiver is an “alien” listener), the existence is possible of utterances that imply a certain social context in relation to the sender, but which do not possess this property in relation to the receiver. Then different strategies relating to the level of information become possible, from the most moderate, limiting itself to the minimalist communiqué K, which only fulfills the function of implication in respect of the sender, to information that is oriented, above all, toward the possibilities at the disposal of the receiver, and, thus, to information that bears the substantially more developed communiqué K1. Particularly often an optimalising strategy is carried out here, one that chooses utterances sufficient to imply the social context with regard to the receiver, but not too “excessive” in terms of the minimum that is necessary for the sender. The strategy relating to the level of information applies, above all, to those narrative genres (or variants of genres), the structural hypothesis of which is to conduct an uninformed receiver into the world of the sender, a world that is well known to the latter, as it were existent and independent in its structure from the fact of presentation. Thus, it is here a matter of, for example, different variants of the novel that conducts one into a “special” environment, one that is alien to the assumed addressee, such as the novel-memoir, or the novel-travel description.

181c. The converse of this situation sketched-out above is the acceptance of the hypothesis that the sender is building the presented world for a receiver that “knows” that world (in the sense established above). The sender utters a communiqué that is so constructed that only for the receiver was it a condition for the emergence of a social context. For the sender him/herself, that context is “unexpected”, because his own communiqué does not possess for him developed implications and is for him/her “actually” only comprehensible in a limited sense. Thus, the sender is, in this case, somehow alien vis-à-vis the presented world, whereby this alien quality generally consists of the fact that when transmitting certain “superficial” information, he/she has no command of the cognitive categories that are familiar to the receiver who is conversant with the presented world. Here a strategy is being employed that one can call “the outsider strategy”. It consists either in a consistent limitation of the sender to communiqué K, one that implies a defined social context only for the receiver, and one that at the same time is maintained in its own categories of description that are peculiar to the sender, or it consists in the introduction of communiqué K1, which is not just richer in information than K, but which also modifies the categories of description toward a certain “particularity” of these for the receiver.

19An optimalising procedure may here consist in applying categories that are so “alien” that they provide a discrete vision of the presented world that is well known to the receiver of the utterance, but categories that are insofar “particular” to him/her that he/she can set them against the receiver’s own specific categories. The narrative-receiving situation de|scribed here appears in genres that employ a narrator who is “ill-informed” about the world, which is seen as close and near to the receiver: in tales told from the point of view of a foreigner, a child, or of “someone from the past”. This narrative procedure (incidentally, one that does not necessarily employ a special motivation for the “alienness” of the narrator) is close to the grotesque, seen as a form that shows the presented world in a manner that accentuates that world’s strangeness or foreignness.

201d. The basis of the last of the fundamental narrative-reception situations is a hypothesis that neither sender nor receiver know (in the sense used in this essay) the world that is constructed and received. The sender is, for example, a “researcher” of this world, one who possesses “scientific” knowledge of it, a knowledge that leads to a closed collection of propositions that are all countable and utterable, whereby these propositions most probably may be of a non-concrete and generalising character. The sender’s acquaintance with the presented reality is, basically, expressed in an ability to build an “artificial” communiqué, one that is “purely scientific” and which does not imply a social context in a “natural” manner, neither in respect of the sender, nor of the receiver. The narrative strategy, which we can here designate “the researcher’s strategy”, in such a situation may consist in confining itself to this type of “scientific” communiqué K, or in moving (and thus transgressing the hypothesis of “science”) toward constructing a broader and more concrete communiqué K1, one that implies a certain social context. The optimalisation of the sender’s utterance aims in this case, on one hand, to consider the type of knowledge of the presented world that he/she possesses—a knowledge that is limited and non-concrete—and, on the other hand, to satisfy the receiver’s need for information that is rich, not schematic, concrete, and deriving from limitless repertoires of “authentic” and direct knowledge of the subject. Examples of this strategy are supplied, inter alia, by the traditional type of the historical novel, which oscillates between “scientific”, generalising knowledge of an epoch, and information that is rendered concrete, “authentic”, and breaking through the barrier of “learning”.

212. For the sake of clarity, we have discussed here narrative-reception situations that play out only on one of the communicative levels, and which generally make part of a narrative utterance. In real texts, narrative strategies are shaped in a way that is more complex. Let us consider, for example, a situation that is analogical to that analysed in point 1b, that is, the situation in which the sender implements a strategy relating to the level of information that lies between minimal utterance K, which implies social context only in relation to his/her own self, and enriched utterance K1, which is aiming at appropriate implications in the receiver as well. If we treat the sender’s communiqué, uttered in this situation, not as an indivisible whole, but rather as composed of, inter alia, the utterance of a figure P1 that belongs to the presented world directed to another figure P2 from that world, then two strategies intersect. Figure P1 will, of course, employ his/her own strategy in his/her utterance, which we can designate as an utterance of the first level. If his/her utterance implies the same social context for him/her and also for the receiver, then this is a strategy of ellipsis, which aims at a minimalisation of the utterance. At the same time, the narrator, whose utterance—including, inter alia, the dialog of P1 and P2—constitutes a second level, taking into consideration the “ignorance” of the receiver, may be inclined to select rather communiqué K1, which is informationally enriched, and, thus, to modify the elliptical character of the dialog of P1 and P2 toward implying the appropriate social context in terms of the receiver too. The conjunction of these two tendencies may produce a compromise that shapes optimal solutions. We are dealing with a narrative-reception situation so described, to a greater or lesser degree, in every narrative text that has quoted utterances.7 In several genres, for example, the epistolary novel, the opposition of the narrative strategy on the level of cited texts (in this case, letters) and the strategy of the level of the narrator that introduces them, becomes especially important for the structure of the entire work.

223. An analogical intersection of strategies can occur between the second and the third level of narrative utterance, that is, between the strategy of the subject of the entirety of the text and the strategy of the narrator who is subordinate to him/her. Let us accept, for example, that utterance K1 of narrator N1 implies, both for the narrator and for the addressee of the narrative O1, the same social context. Narrator N1 can, thus, employ a strategy of ellipsis. Further, let us accept that utterance K1, together with an utterance giving the narrative-reception situation to which K1 belongs form communiqué K2 of the higher-level subject N2, addressed to receiver O2, whereby K2 only in relation to sender N2 implies the appropriate social context. Sender N2, thus, employs a strategy of the level of information, taking into consideration O2. As a result, the “elliptical” strategy N1 is modified by strategy N2, intended to imply a social context for a receiver for whom communiqué K2 does not bear such implications. This situation constitutes an analogy to the conjunction of strategies described above, with the difference that this conjunction takes place between other communicational levels. An illustration of this kind of modifying influence exercised by a higher-level subject on the strategy of a narrator is, for example, a fantastic novel that speaks of the future, one narrated by a “future” narrator to a “future” receiver.8 Its narrator, relying on the knowledge of a contemporary addressee can limit his/her utterance in an elliptical manner; however, the subject of the entirety of the text limits this reduction, out of consideration for “today’s” receiver.

23 The two examples discussed here illustrate the cross-level relations referring to transmitted utterances and to social contexts. Because narrative works have, in principle, at least a tri-level structure, there exists the possibility of a multiple combination of these relations, and a more complex one than that set out here. In many cases, however, the differentiation of subjects and addressees from specific semantic levels of an utterance are of a purely theoretical character. This applies, particularly, to the narrator, whose semantic existence may be composed of the same semantic elements as go to make up the existence of the subject of the entire text. In these situations—this refers, inter alia, to many novels with a narrative subject that is hard to isolate—cross-level relations are also subject to reduction.

24 The issue of the relations referring to any presented, text-internal communication can be transferred in some way to the exterior of the text, and viewed as elements of those relations, inter alia, of extra-textual senders and receivers of the narrative message. One can also treat both the external sender and receiver either as functional entities, reduced to the role of the possessors of specific rules of sending in relation to reception, or as historically existing persons or groups of persons.9 The differentiation of several sender-receiver relations in specific historical circumstances refer to such an extra-textual conception of the participants in narrative communication.10

251. In circumstance in which there exists (as a result of the dominance of specific social groups) a broadly distributed body of information and convictions (often subject to a process whereby they are made absolute) there emerges a social context for literary utterance that is common to certain groupings. On the basis of this, the possibilities exist of practicing:

1. a strategy of ellipsis—which leads to avoiding or silencing both information relating, for example, to the mœurs of a given epoch and social group, and also to the convictions connected with current social configurations, which are seen as “obvious”;
2. a strategy of excess—which reveals information and convictions irrespective of the degree to which they are “obvious” and widely distributed.

26One can speak of the former of these strategies certainly in reference to periods of stable feudal relations, in which a (classicising) literature could exist, which did not need to say anything about the fundamental and obvious social situations in which both authors and their receivers were rooted. This is a literature that in a certain manner exploits the possibility of applying the strategy of ellipsis. However, one can associate a strategy of excess with, for example, the classic bourgeois novel. This novel was produced by a specific social group for its own use, and, thus, could count on a receiver that had at his/her disposal the same social context as the creator. Nonetheless, a feature of this novel is made up, in fact, of the exposure of certain social contexts that are “obvious” in a specific environment.

272. In circumstances in which there exist social groups of differing world-views and bodies of information, groups that connect different social contexts with specific literary utterances, a situation emerges in which an “alien” group is informed of “one’s own” world with the help of messages that by virtue of an appropriate “strategy of level of information” will imply sufficient contexts for the alien, but that will for “one’s own people” not be excessively redundant. Such situations occur, for example, where specific political considerations suggest turning to a potential receiver from an alien social group with certain revealing utterances exposing one’s own social stratum. This took place in French Enlightenment literature, addressed to a bourgeois receiver, but created by representatives of the ruling class. We can see this, too, in Polish positivist writing, if we see it as a “dispatch” to social strata that are not oriented in the mechanisms of the life of privileged groups.

283. The assumption of the necessity of informing a receiver who is oriented within a certain reality of his/her own world from the position of an outsider is met by a literature, which has developed at different times, that exposed the surprising and absurd dimensions of that world. The sender here is usually, for example, a figure who is for some reason not oriented within the realities of the life of the social group that is being criticised; the form of the utterance is a satire of the absurd or the grotesque, a form that is appropriate for writers in this style from Montesquieu and Voltaire to Dürrenmatt and Mrożek.

294. A revelation of the world of an alien social group in service of one’s own group is served by an “engaged” literature of varying sorts. It adopts strategic procedures between the schematic nature of the ideologically rich image, limited, however, in terms of its concreteness and visual quality, and tendencies to naturalistic approximation. A large part of nineteenth-century literature devoted to the worlds of the “lower” strata belongs to this category.

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30We have defined literary conventions sensu stricto as the second fundamental group, besides social contexts, of stereotypes of literary communication. Conventions are usually inscribed in the text as common to the sender and the receiver, or as not common, and, in the latter case, they are accompanied by specific and organised deformations of literary communication. When we speak of a convention that is appropriate to the sender and the receiver, let us further accept the hypothesis that such a system of conventions is taken into consideration that is appropriate to the text-internal persons of the sender and receiver, who often have only a semantic existence. In other words, this is a system of conventions that is presented in the text, offered as one of the bases of the sending-receiving situation that is constituted by the text.

31 As a particularly clear, and, at the same time, complex example of a system of conventions, let us consider the configuration that we can call the fabular paradigm. Here it will be considered in an extremely idealised form, to which certain works belonging to purely narrative genres approximate, that is, novels that can be described as sensational or crime novels. Two elements make up this idealised fabular paradigm:

1. The universe of fabular functions permissible in a specific fabular genre. The term “fabular function” is used here basically in the sense proposed by V. Propp. The fact that one can establish varying hierarchies among fabular functions in a general sense—and here I am thinking of the proposals to analyze their syntax that have been advanced recently11—is not germane here.
2. The aggregate of permissible fabular functions is ordered in the form of storied configurations, so-called dendrites.12 If the first “level” of the fabular functions (representing varying “openings” of a text) encom|passes a certain collection of alternative functions, then the second story is made up of alternative successions of each of those functions, and, thus, on level p alternative successions of each of the functions of level p-1. In this way, a genre universe of fabular functions is ordered in a hieratic alternative configuration, which can be called an aggregate of fabular dendrites.

32Having adopted this description of the fabular paradigm of a narrative genre, we can describe (simplifying and schematising) the development of the plot as a sequential realisation of individual fabular functions belonging to one ramification of the dendrite. Of course—taking into consideration different kinds of inversion in the composition of a narrative—the sequence of this realisation does not have to match the sequence of the stories of the dendrite. The appearance of such fabular paradigms as components of the literary consciousness of specific social groups in specific periods is of fundamental importance for the reception of texts.

33 If we assume the existence of this kind of paradigm as a reader’s “receptive apparatus”, we can accept that sequentially appearing realizations of fabular functions are identified by the receiver as similar to defined elements of a potentially existing fabular dendrite. As a result, that dendrite fulfills at least three functions in the reception of a work.

34A. It is only through a confrontation of individual elements of a text with the dentrite’s elements that these elements are recognised as realizations of fabular functions. B. The identification of the introductory fabular phases of a text with fabular functions constituting the first level of a specific fabular dendrite may lead to a genre identification of the text. C. The identification of a given fabular phase of a work with defined element E of level p of the dendrite clearly limits the “variety” of the next phase; it compels an expectation that the next phase will be realised in the form of one of the members of the alternative that suits element E on story p+1. In this way, the fabular dendrite constitutes for the receiver at different stages of the development of the plot a tool for providing a much higher degree of probability to specific realizations of the fabular functions than to others.

35 It can be argued that to understand the plot of a text means to be able to formulate in its various phases “determining questions” relating to the collection of propositions describing alternative fabular functions.13 If we accept this formulation, then we must recognise the role of the fabular dendrite as consisting in creating the hypotheses of a question (possibly in creating such a nominal model), which permit the reduction of that collection of propositions, and thus an increase in the probability of certain alternative answers. Because of the fabular dendrite, there exists during the reception of certain narrative works the phenomenon of an expectation of defined solutions, the phenomenon of fabular tension, and the phenomenon of surprise and the unexpected. So understood, expectation would be a matter of setting “determining questions” within a collection of propositions that contains certain propositions able to fulfill the role of an answer with a much greater degree of probability than others. Fabular tension would accompany collections of alternative propositions that are equally probable. However, surprise in relation to the receiver’s fabular dendrite would appear where that dendrite permits the formulation of “determining questions” on level p of the plot, but the answer does not belong to the members of an alternative constituting—within the dendrite—level p+1 of the fabula.

36 Of course, it is worth pointing out that alongside the phenomenon of inscribing a perceived plot within the conventional paradigm that is the fabular dendrite, the basis of understanding a fabula during the reception of certain literary genres may well be the localization of fabular confi|gurations within the paradigm supplied by a specific social experience, and thus a paradigm that does not emerge from the conventions of the genre. However, such an understanding via a “social paradigm” belongs, it can be argued, to the previously considered phenomena of social context as a condition of literary communication.

37 Interpreting the plot of a text through fabular paradigms can be compared—instructively—with the construing of expressions of a given language from the universe that is constituted by the alphabet used in that language. To the degree that the choice of a first letter is permissible (within the framework of the universe), so the possibilities of choices of further letters are increasingly limited, and the probability of choosing specific letters constantly increases. The entire activity of successive choices takes place here on the basis of moving from level to level of a dendrite, which consists of sets of letters permissible in individual phases of constructing a word. The progressive limitations of “variety” of choice derive from twofold causes. Above all, every language (seen as a collection of directives for creating words) possesses rules for the distribution of letters that are particular to it, one that excludes a whole set of joint-appearances or succession of letters as inadmissible. Second, every lan|guage operates with rules of meaning, rules that exclude certain inscriptions/letterings as inconsistent with the rules, or, in other words, meaningless. The first of these rules are, of course, more liberal; the second, however, impose greater limitations of choice. Thus, it seems that in the case of a fabular dendrite, two-fold causes of a progressive limitation of variety also operate. Some are of a purely syntactic character, and exclude the appearance side by side with each other of specific fabular functions. Others operate in respect of the meaning of fabular wholes that are appropriate to narrative works.

38 Narrative works in which a fabular configuration does not play a large role are not, in general, received by inscribing them within a specific dendrite, which it is often impossible to construct at all. In many cases, the role of the fabular paradigm is taken by an aggregate of information supplied in the exposition [backstory] of the text, and in a series of summary anticipations. This information can build a certain fabular schema. In the reception of the work, however, in this case there is a confrontation of individual phases of the plot with the anticipated schema and an interpretation of those phases through the mediation of this confrontation. Such a process does not, however, relate to those types of narrative texts in which there is a lack of information in the exposition and in anticipations, and in which the principle is dominant of presenting “pure happening”, pure facticity, or a spontaneity of processes that do not refer to any paradigm. In the reading of such works, there is no reception of the plot via any confrontation at all of individual phases with elements of a schema that is alien to literary consciousness or sketched out in the text. Nor (which is linked with the preceding) is there any limitation of “variation” of choice of further phases, or a setting of questions and creation of predictions. Thus, it is difficult to speak in such situations of understanding the plot via fabular conventions.

39 The above remarks, discussing through a chosen example the func|tioning of literary conventions as conditions of literary communication, have been based on a simplifying hypothesis concerning the identity of the conventions ascribed by the text to the sender and the receiver. In other words, the accepted hypothesis declared that the “persons” of sender and receiver inscribed in the text (both on the level of narrator-addressee of the narrative, and on the level of the sender of the whole-receiver of the whole) remain in ideal accord as to the stereotypes called literary conventions. Moreover, these stereotypes are supposed to be wholly homogenous within the work itself. If we now abandon this simplifying hypothesis, it is necessary to consider—at least in an illustrative manner—such sending-receiving situations inscribed in a work, situations in which the “spectacle” of the conflict of different conventions is played out. It is not a matter here—let us stress once more—of the contact of real but different conventions, which are appropriate to the real persons of senders and receivers; such contact often leads to an inappropriate interpretation of the text.14 It is, however, a matter of a conflict of conventions linked with text-internal instances of sending and receiving. To exemplify this, let us consider two such situations in which there is a conjunction of conventions.

40 The first is usually called parody, and it can be described as an orchestration of the conflict of conventions of sender and receiver on one communicative level—most frequently on the level of narrator-receiver of the narration. In parody (for example, in a heroical-comical long poem), the subject of the entirety of the work inscribes in it in parallel a realised convention—that is, appropriate to the narrator—and an unrealised convention—appropriate to the receiver of the narrative, and present only potentially as a set of unsatisfied expectations. It is not possible here to analyze the methods of signaling an unrealised convention, one that is ascribed to the addressee of the narrative, but the fact is important that the sender of the work orchestrates a clash of expectations and realizations (on the level of the narrator and his/her addressee), which constitutes the substance of the phenomenon of parody. Another mechanism of “staged lack of accord” relating to literary conventions belongs to stylisation. The subject of the work as a whole does not appear here—as he/she does in parody—only as the organiser of situations between the presented sender and receiver at a lower level (that is, between the narrator and the addressee), but, in fact, involves in the game his/her own conventions and his/her “correct” receiver. Thus, the conflict of conventions plays out here between the level of the general sending instance of the work and the level of the narrative instance. In other words, two conventions are inscribed in the work, not in terms of equality (as in parody), but in terms of subordination. The superior one—although it is signaled only as an unsatisfied expectation—is the potentially present convention from the field that pertains to the subject of the work; the subordinate one—and the one that is realised—is the convention of the subject of the narrative (narrator). The latter is drawn from the deposits of literary methods that are, in principle, alien to the subject of the work. In all this, the scale of the strategies that the subject of the work may apply in a conflict of conventions, ranges from a maximum faithfulness of the narrator’s utterance to what is presented as “alien” to the subject of the work as far as to a deep-reaching assimilation of the “alienness” to what is suggested as “his/her own”. To put it somewhat metaphorically, one can speak in the first case of archaicising tendencies, and in the second of modernising ones.

41 This example must suffice to register the problem of conflicts between conventions that are inscribed in a work and to register the strategies that relate to the orchestration of these conflicts. To illustrate this set of issues via the question of parody and stylisation is instructive inasmuch as it leads us fairly directly to the analogy that emerges between the two variants of stereotypes of literary communication: conventionalised social contexts and strictly literary conventions. Thus, in a situation in which communication operates with different social contexts, and also in the case of the introduction of abrasive literary conventions, we are dealing with varied manifestations of orchestrating and strategic operations.

4

42We have been speaking hitherto of literary stereotypes as of universes of informational possibilities, against which the distinguishing of specific information takes place, universes that condition literary communication. Let us finally consider the fact that those very processes of literary communication are conventionalised and can be identified against the background of certain model processes. All manifestations of literary communication function—this is obvious—in the context of different extra-literary forms of cognitive contact. The situation of sending and receiving presented in literature is one of many socially active and fixed cognitive situations. Above all, one can place them in a line next to research and scientific situations, in which there also takes place a receptive processing of certain information or communiqués. It is surely the case that there exist clear analogies between certain situations in research and science, seen as codified and socially fixed models of cognitive procedure, and situations of sending and receiving that are proper to literary communication. It is possible to assert that certain variants of literary cognitive situations reproduce situations of scientific cognition and that with regard to methodological models of scientific procedure they are in a relation that one can call, in a somewhat metaphorical manner, mimetic. Such “methodological mimetism” (or epistemological mimetism15) means that the sending-receiving situation within certain works is shaped against a background methodological models of scientific cognition, which in this way become a variant of the stereotypes that condition literary communi|cation—stereotypes of the very process of communication. These are present in the background of sending and receiving, constitute its modeling foundation, and regulate and firm up the process of communi|cation. Of course, it must be pointed out that we are continuing to speak here, above all, of those sending-receiving situations that are inscribed in a work, and not of situations that are external to that work.

43 Let us look—in schematic, condensed manner—at three cases of “metho|dological mimetism”. These three cases reveal much; there is also a possibility of linking them with historically defined formations of narrative art.

441. In certain narrative genres the situation of sending and receiving that is inscribed in a text imitates the situation in which the historian finds him/herself when interpreting so-called secondary sources, and, thus, messages that are indirectly and purposefully informative: chronicles, diaries, letters.16 Of course, such texts do not belong among those that “simply”, in a manner that is somehow neutral, create or institute a certain novel-type fiction. They belong to those in which the narrative situation or the pragmatic context is clearly indicated. In such texts, the internal receiver has the task of reconstructing, on the basis of the (indirect) “sources” that are supplied, the presented world and its meaning (or model value). One of the obligations of the receiver is the historian’s actions, which are vital in encounters with secondary sources: finding an answer to the question of the authenticity of the source message and of the credibility of the informant. The “authenticity” of the “sources” at the disposal of this receiver-researcher can be analyzed if the researcher-receiver knows the manner in which these “sources” were passed on. This means, for example, how they were “discovered”, and the quality of their “edition”. The historian can consider their credibility, if their “author”, the informant, is revealed to him/her. This is, however, above all the case if the historian is in possession of data connected with the “author”, such as the purpose of his/her informational activities, the frequency of errors committed by him/her, and a description of the receivers for which the messages were intended. Making available such data to the receiver presented above (the historian) makes it possible for him/her to undertake activities that imitate the procedure called source criticism. By the way, “sources” and the circumstances of their transmission are, in most cases, so constructed that “criticism” produces positive results, and constitutes a guarantee of trust vis-à-vis the message.

45 In principle, the classic nineteenth-century novel did not offer a modelling of the situation of sending and receiving according to the pattern of criticism and interpretation of secondary sources. This variant of methodological mimetism was, however, familiar to the pre-classic novel of the eighteenth century. It frequently highlights the existence of a creator of a source (in memoirs, a series of letters, diaries), and the way in which that source reaches the receiver (for example, through the introduction of the person of an editor17). Furthermore, in the modern novel, the communicative situation is, in certain cases, sketched out as an aggregate of operations from the field of criticism of secondary sources, operations that serve to reconstruct on this basis the facts of the presented world and serve to assess its modelling value. Here one can cite the example of Teodor Parnicki’s writing.18

462. In a very large group of narrative texts, one can perceive a sending-receiving situation that constitutes an equivalent of a variant, more modern model of historical cognition: the conduct of a researcher who comes face to face with so-called direct (primary) sources, that is, varying data or materials that are most often not intended as a communiqué, the interpretation of which makes possible a reconstruction of historical facts and their elucidation. In novels that eliminate the narrative situation or the pragmatic context, and that aim at an ideal of objective or dramatic narrative, that is in a novel that shows rather than tells, the presented receiver is placed vis-à-vis such “sources” as a character’s utterances (and, thus, not an utterance-communiqué that directly thematise the presented world) and varying—often uninterpreted—aspects of an external and internal world. These “sources” may constitute chaotic and unintegrated configurations, often demonstrating how difficult they are to interpret, although—to put it in general terms—they do not have to advance the thesis of the impossibility of unambiguously interpreting them. They are vested in a functionality—possible to uncover, but often difficult to grasp—in relation to some model of reality or some sphere of meanings.

47 In keeping with the methodological schema of cognition of reality via the mediation of direct sources, the receiver-researcher is not confronted with the problem of checking their credibility (inasmuch as the concept of credibility does not apply to primary sources), but is confronted with other complex tasks that belong to the right conduct for historical research. This means, above all, the transformation of the “source” information of the text into “historical facts” (or more precisely, “historiographical” ones) by performing the appropriate constructional actions. These “facts” may be, for example, fabular events or personages—reconstructed from individual utterances and views. Further, one can speak of undertaking attempts—on the basis of facts—to build up hypotheses that elucidate them, and, thus, of undertaking attempts to discover the “historical” regularities that condition these “facts”, which in the final analysis make up the meaning or model value of the text. The thesis of the rationality of human actions, which in principle obtains both in historical explanation and in the imitation of that explanation as the basis for the interpretation of the “sources” contained in a novel, and, on the other hand, the principle of the functionality of the elements of a work—these are assumptions that ensure the possibility of setting up hypotheses to explain the facts of a novel or to construct its generalised meanings.19 The making of a choice is assumed in relation to equiponderant explanatory hypotheses, and by the same token a certain independent activity is posited on the part of the receiver who makes these assumptions, however much the final, only, and “correct” result of this activity is determined. Finally, the last phase of cognition on the basis of primary sources is constituted by the checking of the assumptions made, via their confrontation with the “new” facts that come forth in the course of a further cognition of the work, and by the possible advancing of new hypotheses. This is connected with the phenomenon of the perpetual reinterpretation of known phases of a presented reality via successively realised phases (see Sławiński 1967, 26-27).

48 As has already been indicated, the cognitive process described here can be considered as something “objective” that is inscribed in narrative texts. On one hand, it lacks a revealed pragmatic or interpretative context; on the other hand, however, it does not suggest the uninterpretability or basic polysemy of the “sources” or “materials” that make up these works. Thus, we are not talking here of, inter alia, the classic nineteenth-century novel that imposes interpretations of presented facts, or of several types of contemporary novel, but rather of certain variants of the “post-classic” novel, for example, novels related from a personal position (and, thus, in principle not commented on by a narrator), which emerge in Polish literature in the “Młoda Polska” (Young Poland) period and later.

493. In narrative works, in which a sending-receiving situation is inscribed that is analogical to that which takes place during cognition of historical facts on the basis of primary sources, it is fundamental that there is always ascertainable a certain meaningfulness and model-quality. However, the possibility exists of creating such configurations of infor|mation supplied by narrative texts that cannot be made subject to the operations of a historian who is oriented toward searching for un|ambiguous interpretations, and of creating such configurations in which such research operations are not inscribed as appropriate sending-receiving situations. This happens when “sources” or “materials” that go to make up a work do not lead to the construction of specific facts, or when the constructed facts cannot be unambiguously interpreted and are not functional in relation to some meanings, and, above all, when they lead to many meanings or equiponderant models. If in this case the situation of the presented receiver is an imitation of the position of a researcher, then it is of a researcher who in translating the data of experience constructs parallel hypotheses or parallel models of the world, and not having at his/her disposal appropriate methods for their verification, recognises their relativity and equiponderant status. Thus, he/she either allows the “polysemy of the world” to speak in a direct fashion, or he/she indirectly proclaims a thesis of polysemy. Such communicative situations are usually built into several contemporary novels, ones that operate with the juxtaposition of equiponderant interpretations, or that build parallel variants of the presented world (see Eco 1989, 21-23).

50 The phenomena of literary communication that are inscribed in narrative works have been dealt with in this essay as conditioned by certain stereotypes, constituting, on one hand, universes of informational possi|bilities (as socially functioning contexts of certain utterances and fixed literary conventions), and, on the other hand, by stereotypes operating as epistemological-methodological models of cognitive procedures. It is only against the background of such stereotypes—this is the thesis that is put forward above—that the situation, potentially present in narrative texts, of sending-receiving communication is possible. It is necessary to add, however, that these stereotypes operate in varying proportions: usually one of them (which one depends on, inter alia, on literary genre) dominates the remainder in its function as a background conditioning the process of literary communication that is established in a narrative work.

Notes

• 1 A pioneering role in the holistic treatment of the literary situation is played by Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Qu’est-ce que la littérature” (1948). Among Polish writers, the issue of the literary receiver is dealt with in theoretical terms by: Głowiński (1965; 1967), Balcerzan (1968) and, above all, Lem (1968), whose principal concern is the role of the receiver, his/her stereotypes, and his/her categories in the constituting of the literary text.
• 2 See: Okopień-Sławińska (1971) and in this volume. Other Polish studies dealing with this matter include: Sławiński (1967a), Balcerzan (1968), and Handke (1969).
• 3 The term “stereotype” is used here independently of the tradition started by Walter Lippmann in sociology (Lippmann 1922). I have drawn the suggestion of how to use this term from Levý (1963).
• 4 The concept of convention in literature is made more precise by Okopień-Sławińska (1965). See also Browne (1956), Hauser (1958).
• 5 See Wierzbicka (1969). Important observations on the subject of the role of linguistic and extra-linguistic context in linguistic communication are contained in MacIver (1936).
• 6 The description of this type of communicative situation remains influenced by Sartre’s remarks about the author and the reader of a novel being plunged into the same history. Any thought of a community of the world of author and reader of a novel is linked in Sartre’s writing with a traditional conception of stability, the unchangeable quality of the world of epic.
• 7 This issue has been especially widely discussed in relation to dramatic works in which there exists a clear contradiction of the “inner” and “outer” function of a character’s utterance. The type of dialog that implies a contradiction of this kind is called “diffusional” by Levý (1963). See also Ingarden (1960), Świontek (1971).
• 8 This example comes from the earlier mentioned work by Handke (1969, 159-160), which provides much material for reflection on the narration-reception situation in narrative art.
• 9 With regard to this distinction, see Okopień-Sławińska (1971).
• 10 The comments in the points that follow owe a great deal to Sartre’s considerations relating to the literary public (Sartre 1948, 221-237).
• 11 See, for example, Barthes (1975).
• 12 On the subject of the concept of “dendrites”, see Giedymin & Kmita (1966).
• 13 On the subject of “determining questions”, see Giedymin (1964, I) and Giedymin & Kmita (1966).
• 14 This problem is considered with reference to Żeromski’s fiction by Głowiński (1968).
• 15 The concept of “methodological mimetism” refers to Eco’s remarks on the “epistemological metaphor” Eco (1989) that appears in art, a metaphor of seeing the world through science.
• 16 On concept and classification of historical sources, see Topolski (1968). On credibility and authenticity, see Giedymin (1964, II), Topolski (1968, 295-310).
• 17 Problems of making novelistic fiction credible in a novel of this type are analyzed in detail by Jasińska (1963), Romberg (1962).
• 18 Małgorzata Książek-Czermińska draws attention to the phenomenon of “source criticism” in Parnicki’s novels (Książek-Czermińska 1965).
• 19 On the subject of explanatory hypotheses in history, see Topolski (1968). Lem gives a valuable description of the process of reception (Lem 1968). He also employs the concept of the interpretative hypothesis, and also the optimalising reception strategy. The issue of the receiver’s activity when constructing the meanings of a narrative work is touched on by Głowiński (1968).